Abraham Verghese
UTSA presents reading by writer-physician Abraham Verghese
(March 4, 2003)--The UTSA Department of English, Classics, and Philosophy will present a reading by Abraham Verghese at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 7 in the Business Building University Room (2.06.04) on the 1604 Campus. A reception and book signing will follow the reading.
Verghese, who is director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics
in the School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center
at San Antonio, has M.D. and M.F.A. degrees. He is author of two bestsellers,
"My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People In The Age
of AIDS" and "The Tennis Partner." His writing has appeared
in The New Yorker, Granta, The North American Review, Sports Illustrated,
Story and many medical journals.
Praised for the quality of the writing and the deep passion expressed about
treating AIDS in Johnson City, Tenn., "My Own Country" was nominated
for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine called it one of
the five best books of 1994. The New York Times Book Review called the book
"an account of the plague years in America, beautifully written, fascinating
and tragic, by a doctor who was shaped and changed by his patients."
"My Own Country" was made into a Showtime original movie directed by Mira Nair ("Mississippi Masala" and "Kama Sutra") and starred Naveen Andrews ("The English Patient") as the author.
Verghese's second book, "The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss," is about coming to personal terms with love and loss through the death of his best friend and tennis partner.
Born in Ethiopia in 1955 to parents who immigrated from India, Verghese attended medical school in Ethiopia and worked in various hospitals in the U.S. before going to Madras to complete his medical education.
In 1980, he returned to the U.S., where he did his internship and residency at Johnson City, Tenn. He trained in Boston as a specialist in infectious diseases, and returned to Johnson City to practice his specialty. It was there that he unexpectedly found himself dealing almost exclusively with HIV and AIDS, which soon became the focus of his career. Verghese spent four years in Johnson City, 1985 through 1989, becoming an expert on the disease.
In 1990, he worked at the University of Iowa's outpatient AIDS clinic. While there, he attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was encouraged to turn his Johnson City experiences into a book and to write short stories.
Leaving the writers' program, Verghese became professor of medicine and chief of infectious disease at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas. He began writing the story of Johnson City at this time, emerging with his first book in 1994.
In a 2001 graduation speech he delivered at Swarthmore College, Verghese said, "Much of my education and many of my most valuable lessons came from my patients, in particular the experience of taking care of people with HIV in a small town in Tennessee… There was an important lesson I learned there from my patients… It has to do with the meaning of life question… it is amazing to me how one emotion in particular comes leaping out."
"It is the emotion that asks, 'What is the meaning of my life?' This is a question that you and I ask ourselves, but we also spend a lot of time delaying the answer to that question, thinking that meaning will come when we perhaps enter the college of our dreams, or graduate from college, or when we marry or have children or make our first million. And indeed meaning can emerge from all these events."
For more information, call (210) 458-4374.
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© The University of Texas at San Antonio, 2003